Tag Archives: netbook

Google Books: please make better use of screen space on my netbook

The screen-shot below shows the appearance of a 15 April 1972 Billboard magazine article about Pink Floyd, in Google Books, on the screen of my Lenovo S10-S2 netbook, using my default settings. 

Screengrab, showing the top of a scanned magazine page, with a picture and then only a few lines of text showing

Although I’ve used Google Books’ “full screen” setting, this only uses the full width of the screen, not its height. Of the viewport’s 509 pixels height, virtually a fifth, 98 pixels, are taken up with navigation tools which are, while I’m reading the article, redundant:

The top of the previous screengrab, showing navigation links

It would be good if Google would let me hide that header until I need it again, and thereby reduce the amount of vertical scrolling needed as I read the multi-column content.